Do You Want to Be Happy? - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you. Friends, the next several weeks, so between now and the beginning of Lent, we're going to be reading in our gospel from the Sermon on the Mount. So it's a great opportunity, again, to return to this primal teaching of Jesus that probably sums up the way he typically preached. So what Matthew does in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of his gospel, that's where you find it. get out your Bibles, Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7, is this great speech of Jesus that probably represents the way he typically taught. Well, we begin today with a sort of overture to it, which we call the Beatitudes, right? Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain. After he had sat down, his disciples came to him, and he began to teach. That's important. So we're at the very beginning.

0:52 Jesus goes up the mountain, so he's like Moses there. Moses gets the law on the mountain. Jesus, the new Moses, is going to give a new law. The fact that he sits down is important because that was the attitude of the teacher in the ancient world. See, we're used to what I'm doing right now, that the teacher would stand at a podium, but in the ancient world, you'd sit down and the disciples would kind of arrange themselves at your feet. So it's Jesus the teacher, Jesus the law giver, the Son of God, speaking to us now in a definitive way. And about what? About beatitudo. So the beatitudes. Beatitudo in Latin means happiness.

1:38 It's the one thing we all want. I don't care who's listening to me. I don't care what your background is. I don't care what your gender is. I don't care what your education level is. I don't care what your ethnicity is. Everyone listening to me right now, anyone you will ever speak to, wants to be happy. The worst person in the world wants to be happy. The most lost person in the world wants to be happy. We can't avoid it. We are truth and happiness seeking animals. That's the way we're built. Our minds seek truth, our wills seek happiness. it. So here we have the definitive teacher sitting down to instruct us on what will make us happy. And so we listen. Now, we can approach the eight Beatitudes in a number of ways. I'm going to come at it from a particular angle today. By beginning with this one, blessed, he says, and it can mean blessed, it can mean lucky, it can mean happy.

2:47 Makarios is the Greek word there. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. I want to start with that because heart, right? Core is the Latin word for heart. What's at the core of your life, of your personality?

3:08 What's the organizing principle of your life? That's your heart. So behind or beyond or underneath mind and will and passions and all of that, there's this center. What's it focused on? What are you finally about and interested in? See, that's the question of the heart. What's the trouble with us sinners? We have divided hearts. the deepest part of our soul, our psyche, our personality, the deepest center, is divided. It wants this today. It wants that tomorrow. It thinks wealth is the most important thing in the world until it doesn't work out. Then it seeks power. And then when that doesn't work out, it seeks pleasure. And then it might get back into a spiritual track, but then it loses patience and it does something else.

4:07 The heart is divided. Jesus says, you want to be happy? Be clean of heart. Some translations, pure of heart. Other translations, single-hearted. Now, that's getting close to it. Single-hearted. Remember, I've told you before, Kierkegaard, the philosopher, said the saint is someone whose life is about one thing. That means the saint has a clear, organizing principle of his or her life.

4:41 The heart of the saint seeks God. Listen now. And then sees everything else in relation to God. St. Augustine said that, right? The key to happiness is love God and then love everything else for the sake of God. That's the formula. Put that up on your screensaver. That's the formula, everybody. Don't love principally wealth, pleasure, power, honor, worldly things, politics. Don't love that. Love God. Love God first, and then let everything else fall into a kind of harmony around that central, unambiguous love of your heart. See, be clean of heart, be pure of heart. That's the key.

5:35 Again, the trouble is our souls are like cacophonies, not symphonies. See, because the divided heart, it's just a mess, it's a jumble. And I know, look, we're all sinners. And so we feel that, that what should be a unified symphony is a cacophony. Be clean of heart. Now, what follows from that? Well, here's one that really parallels it, I think. When Jesus says, How blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That metaphor of hunger and thirst is powerful, isn't it? Because when you're really hungry, it is all preoccupying. It's what your body needs, what your body seeks and wants. When you're thirsty, especially, something dreadful about terrible thirst, that you need water now. So what is your soul hungry and thirsty for?

6:32 Well, again, the souls of us sinners, power, pleasure, acceptance, you know. We run after all these foods for the soul that don't satisfy. Or think of the woman at the well, thirsty, right? Jesus says, you come every day to this well, you drink, but you get thirsty again because you're thirsting after all the wrong things. How blessed you are, happy, lucky you are, makarios, if you hunger and thirst for righteousness. What's righteousness? It's the path of God. It's the will of God. When you wake up in the morning, what do you want at the bottom of your soul? What do you want? That's a good question. Go on retreat, maybe, to try to answer that question.

7:26 You'll be happy if you seek righteousness, to do the will of God. And what you'll find is, again, everything else in your life will fall into a kind of harmony around that fundamental hunger. All right, so what follows from cleanliness of heart, cleanness of heart, from hungering and thirsting for righteousness, How blessed are the merciful. Now, why? Well, see, mercy, first of all, means love as it appears in a fallen, suffering world. Right? To love is to will the good of the other, as I've often told you. When you do that in a fallen world, it'll look like mercy because people are in a suffering state.

8:20 Well, see, God is love. That's all he is, right through. God is love. Therefore, when your heart is focused in a single-minded way upon God, when you're hungering and thirsting for God's will, what happens? You will become conformed unto mercy. See, God's mercy then will flow naturally through you into the world. That's the secret, everybody, of the lives of the saints. Why are the saints such conduits of mercy and grace? Because they're single-hearted. They're not divided. Not turning from this to that. They've turned toward God. Now they're translucent.

9:13 and the divine light can shine through them. See, so blessed are the merciful. And then relatedly, how blessed are the peacemakers. They'll be called the sons and daughters of God. Well, here's the same principle. what sows peace into the world is a peaceful heart. If your heart is focused, it's on one thing. If your life has become like a rose window, like a harmony, like a symphony, well, then you will naturally radiate peace around you. You'll become a bearer of peace. Concomitantly, if your life is a jumble, your interior life is a cacophony, if you've lost harmony, you will sow cacophony around you.

10:13 You will become a bearer of dysfunction and disharmony around you. I take that principle to the bank. Who are the peacemakers? Those who are peaceful on the inside. I don't know an exception to that. Who are the disturbers of the peace? Those who are projecting outward their own inner disharmony. So clean of heart, making you merciful, which makes you a peacemaker. Uh-huh. That's exactly how it works. Think of how the saints are depicted with halos. And the idea there is the saint is someone who becomes luminous. Their inner luminosity shines and brings light to those around them. Beautiful. That's how it works. Okay, so there's the basic spiritual program.

11:08 But now, look at some of these darker Beatitudes. And it might sound paradoxical, what makes you happy, but it's very important now to get this. Jesus also says, Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Now remember, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the rest will be given unto you. There's the principle, by the way. It's exactly what I'm talking about. So blessed are you, yes indeed, when you seek the divine will. But in a world gone wrong, which is our world, those who walk the path of righteousness will necessarily be persecuted. Not sometimes, not typically, I mean all the time. Why? Because we live in a dysfunctional world.

12:07 And so when you show up in that world, rightly ordered, bearing mercy and peace to those around you, Some will benefit and appreciate it. That's true. Trust me when I tell you, a lot of people who are deeply invested in the dynamics of a dysfunctional world will hate you and want to bring you down and will persecute you. Because, see, you're a sign of contradiction to them. You're a source of enormous trouble for them. So you think of someone who's really wily and canny in the ways of the world. They figured out how the system works. They know how to frighten people. They know how to lure people. You know what I'm saying? They made their way through a sinful world very effectively. Then you come along full of beatitudo, radiating mercy and peace.

13:10 Uh-uh. You're throwing off their game. I remember years ago, I won't tell you where it was. It was this highly complex organization. And I was talking to this fellow who was deeply invested in it. And he said, here's one thing to keep in mind. Whenever you talk to somebody in this organization, the first thing on his or her mind is advancing his own career. And so if what you're talking about will help him, he might support you. If it doesn't, he will oppose you. All right, that's the way of the world. That's the way of the fallen world. And so don't be surprised, Jesus says, if you listen to the Beatitudes, that people will persecute you. I'll close with this. It's actually, everybody, a good test. If you've made your way through your Christian life and you've excited very little opposition, you're not living it very well.

14:04 Period. End of argument. You know what I'm saying? You've made your way through your Christian life in this fallen world and no one's objecting to you, no one finds you a problem, no one's putting obstacles in your way, you're probably conformed way too much to the fallen world. That's why how blessed you are, lucky, happy you are when people persecute you because of my name. That means you're on the right path. That means you're on the path of Beatitudo.